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[FOSSi Dial-Up] Tim Ansell - Skywater PDK: Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process

FOSSi Foundation · 33.8K views · 2020-06-30 · 1:35:45

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Overview

Tim Ansell presents the SkyWater PDK, a fully open source manufacturable process development kit for a 130nm process, as the first FOSSi Dial-Up talk. He covers its role in a fully open chip design flow.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to it for Google's reasons for backing open silicon and for background on the open-source chip design workflow.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2020–2024

Topics

Semiconductors & chip manufacturingHacker culture & free software
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skywater pdk130nmopen hardwareasicefablessgoogle

What people said

panick21_ · 2024-10 · Recommendation

> The architecture doesn't offer anything actually new to the industry. There is more to live then technical specification. The change in the license and the development pattern and the business model does actually matter. I suggest you watch some talks by Krste Asanovic who created the RISC-V project, he explained exactly this point. > Open source software is unreasonably effective because of that trivial marginal cost of reproduction. Its open hardware isn't as good as open software. Yes we know. Sadly we don't have a universal 3d printer. But that doesn't mean its worthless. > Unlike the Linux kernel you can't compile a CPU core and reboot and get some performance gain. Have you never used an modern FPGA? > It just doesn't solve any of the very real problems of producing hardware. If you have a narrow point of you of only considering manufacturing but if you broaden your point of view and look at the whole value chain, it absolutely does. And you know who agrees with me, tons of companies who have invested in RISC-V and the ecosystem. If you don't believe me, I suggest you watch this video from Google where they explain why they are doing what they are doing: [VIDEO] You can find videos like that from other companies, including hardware companies. > It doesn't obviate the challenges or costs of developing new process nodes or chemistries. I didn't know that producing hardware was the same as developing knew nodes. In your mind, the only thing that matters is the cost of ne

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nickik · 2021-07 · Reference

Google has done a lot of effort in that direction. The first ever chips have already been produced that are fully open source from the tools used to make to the complete tool chain need to manufacture them. There is a huge amount of great stuff going on this this area. Tim Ansell - Skywater PDK: Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process [VIDEO]

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KenoFischer · 2020-12 · Reference

It was talked about all over the place. E.g. see [VIDEO] from June around the one hour mark. As I said, I'm very far from an insider.

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Sources

Video by FOSSi Foundation, played through YouTube.

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